An acclaimed Associated Press photographer who took the controversial yet compelling photos of people jumping and falling from the World Trade Center Towers on Sept. 11 and an acclaimed reporter who covered the event will speak Monday, April 15, at West Virginia University.p. The WVU Perley Isaac Reed School of Journalism will present”Covering Terror: The Images And Stories From Ground Zero”at 7 p.m. in Room G24 Eiesland Hall on the Downtown Campus. The public is invited to attend.

AP photographer Richard Drew was on the ground during the World Trade Center attacks and took the photos of people jumping and falling from the towers. The photos ran in newspapers across the country and world and have won numerous awards, including the second-place prize for spots news singles in the 2001 National Headliner Awards.

Included in Drews presentation will be more than 50 photos that captured the scene after the first airplane hit, the towers falling and rescue efforts.

AP correspondent Richard Pyle experienced the World Trade Center attacks first-hand from the rooftop of his apartment building two miles from the center and then on the scene at Ground Zero, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge as the second tower fell.

Their discussion is part of Ogden Newspapers Visiting Professor Dr. George Espers”The Role of the Journalist in War”class. Esper designed the course as a way to study the evolution of war reporting and the role of the war correspondent from World War II to the current War on Terrorism.

“Perhaps our most extraordinary chronicle of Sept. 11 will be the eyewitness accounts, the stories and the pictures produced by the journalists at Ground Zero. Dr. Esper has brought two of the finest correspondents to share their unique view from Ground Zero,”said School of Journalism Dean Christine Martin.

Drew and Pyle are no strangers to covering terror and strife.

As a rookie on the staff of the Pasadena Star-News, Drew was one of only four photographers present when Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 4, 1968. The pictures he took that day eventually led to a staff job at The Associated Press bureau in San Francisco.

His foreign assignments include the U.S. invasion of Grenada; the Falklands War between Argentina and Britain; the Moscow and Montreal Olympics; a volcanic eruption in Colombia; and the Miss Universe pageants in El Salvador, the Dominican Republic and Peru. Hes also covered the Ali-Frazier fight in Zaire; Prince Charlestour of Mexico; and a plane crash that killed 300 German tourists in the Dominican Republic.

Pyle joined The Associated Press in Detroit in 1960. In mid-1965, he was transferred to the AP World (international) Desk in New York, and in 1967 to the Washington bureau. In August 1968, he joined AP’s Saigon war staff as a field correspondent. Two years later, in September 1970, he was named chief of the Saigon bureau, a post he held for nearly three years.

Pyle returned to Washington in 1973, at the height of the Watergate story, and in October scored a major beat on Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation. Three days later, he headed to Cairo on special two-month assignment to cover the Arab-Israeli war.

Over the next six years, Pyle covered various beats in Washington. As members of the AP’s investigative team, he and a colleague spent six months investigating the Chappaquiddick incident. He was at the White House when President Nixon resigned in August 1974. During the Carter administration, he covered foreign and national security affairs on Capitol Hill.

Special reporting assignments during this time included Beirut during the Lebanon civil war (1976), Cuba (1977) and Panama (1978). He covered the prison escape of James Earl Ray, killer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., at Brushy Mountain, Tenn. (1978) and the Three Mile Island nuclear crisis (1979).

Based in New York since 1990, Pyle has covered major mob trials and other stories, while staying connected to military and historical events. He was part of a team of AP staffers who returned to Vietnam for the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, producing a prize-winning series called”Vietnam Legacy.”